A Spirit of Community
One of the big things that’s different between blogging on a site like blogger, typepad or wordpress.com and blogging out with your own domain is that you actually have to seek out relationships in order to get people to visit your site.
You see, these sites all have communities built around them. You can see what people are posting about, your dashboard shows you recent posts by topic, and there is a little network that helps you get new visitors.
When you have your own domain, you get traffic from one of four places:
- Referrals (someone sends people to your site)
- An online community (like Digg, Propeller, or Stumble Upon)
- Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Technorati, etc)
- Comments you leave on other sites.
So, you actually have to put a little more effort into getting new readers than you would on one of the other sites. Of course you can also increase your traffic on these sites using different ones of these points listed above.
However, I’ve found that a majority of my traffic comes from #3, and that’s a majority of the traffic that actually makes this blog money.
If you’re interested in increasing your traffic from search engines, you have a couple of tools that you can use. One is by picking up some plugins that will help to put more keywords and content into your posts. Another is that you will have to get more links. The third is to ask a Search Engine Marketing Consultant what you need to do to increase your page rank.
These consultants work with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is the long way of saying that they try to get your content as close to the top of a search as possible because the statistics show that the #1 or #2 ranked result get most of the traffic.
So, whatever method you decide to employ, just keep on plugging, making connections, improving the data, writing great content and maybe look into an SEO opportunity if you have the money. You won’t regret it.
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Comments from MInTheGap
Loc said,
Wrote on December 28, 2007 @ 9:13 pm
Actually you might want to rethink how your doing number 3 min. I found your site by using google, but I was searching for people that thought women were inferior and don’t deserve the basic human rights.
Vlad said,
Wrote on December 28, 2007 @ 11:39 pm Subscribed
I would suggest you to look into Hittail, it did some wonderful things to my websites.
StumbleUpon is one of my favorites.
Mary said,
Wrote on December 31, 2007 @ 5:02 pm
Two or three of my blogging buddies stuck around at my blog after googling “Amish Friendship Bread” of all posts! And to think I almost didn’t post about it way back when…I’m so glad I did now. These ladies have been such a blessing to the blog and to me!
I never thought about the typical blogsites having better community, or more access to their blogs than ones like ours with our own .com. Interesting!
Happy New Years, MIn!
MInTheGap said,
Wrote on January 2, 2008 @ 9:48 am
Hey Mary– that Amish Friendship Bread post beats anything I’ve ever done as far as comments!
Our sites have better Google traffic than the ones in the sub-domains, but we have to do more work with communities. That’s why I’m on StumbleUpon, MyBlogLog and other sites that allow me to have some of the same types of community. But in these you have to get involved.
Mary said,
Wrote on January 2, 2008 @ 5:28 pm
In reference to the Amish Friendship Bread post–I know, it’s crazy isn’t it? It was picked up and featured in two different bread websites, etc. I guess you just never know what will draw them in!
I can’t believe all the invitations I’m constantly getting to sites/forums and other online communities…they all seem great, but I guess I’m just hoping God will bring the right ones to my blog. It’s hard to keep up with my faithful readers, much less trying to garner more. So far I’m happy puttering along as is.
Looking forward to more from you in this brand new year! Your new categories sound good!
MInTheGap said,
Wrote on January 3, 2008 @ 9:23 am
I’m glad to hear that your site’s growing, Mary. And I look forward to seeing what I’ll write about too!
Mary said,
Wrote on January 3, 2008 @ 5:38 pm
Lol, that’s good! Can’t ever run out of topics can we?